1Introduction

1.1Welcome

This is the manual for Rockbox. Rockbox is an open source firmware replacement for a
growing number of digital audio players. Rockbox aims to be considerably more functional and
efficient than your device’s stock firmware while remaining easy to use and customisable.
Rockbox is written by users, for users. Not only is it free to use, it is also released under the
GNU General Public License (GPL), which means that it will always remain free both to use
and to change.

Rockbox has been in development since 2001, and receives new features, tweaks and fixes each
day to provide you with the best possible experience on your digital audio player. A major
goal of Rockbox is to be simple and easy to use, yet remain very customisable and
configurable. We believe that you should never need to go through a series of menus for an
action you perform frequently. We also believe that you should be able to configure almost
anything about Rockbox you could want, pertaining to functionality. Another top priority of
Rockbox is audio playback quality – Rockbox, for most models, includes a wider range of
sound settings than the device’s original firmware. A lot of work has been put into making
Rockbox sound the best it can, and improvements are constantly being made. All
models have access to a large number of plugins, including many games, applications,
and graphical “demos”. You can load different configurations quickly for different
purposes (e.g. a large font for in your car, different sound settings for at home).
Rockbox features a very wide range of languages, and all supported models also
have the ability to talk to you – menus can be voiced and filenames spelled out or
spoken.

1.2Getting more help

This manual is intended to be a comprehensive introduction to the Rockbox firmware. There
is, however, more help available. The Rockbox website at http://www.rockbox.org/ contains
very extensive documentation and guides written by members of the Rockbox community and
this should be your first port of call when looking for further help.

If you cannot find the information you are searching for on the Rockbox website there are a
number of support channels you should have a look at. You can try the Rockbox forums
located at http://forums.rockbox.org/. The mailing lists are another option, and can be found
at http://www.rockbox.org/mail/. From that page you can subscribe to the lists and browse the
archives. To search the list archives simply use the search field that is located on the left side
of the website. Furthermore, you can ask on IRC. The main channel for Rockbox is #rockbox
on irc://irc.freenode.net. Many helpful developers and users are usually around. Just join
and ask your question (don’t ask to ask!) – if someone knows the answer you’ll
usually get an answer pretty quickly. More information including IRC logs can be
found at http://www.rockbox.org/irc/. We also have a web client so that you can join
the Rockbox IRC channel without needing to install additional software onto your
computer.

If you think you have found a bug please make sure it actually is a bug and is still present in
the most recent version of Rockbox. You should try to confirm that by using the above
mentioned support channels first. After that you can submit that issue to our tracker. Refer to
section G for details on how to use the tracker.

1.3Naming conventions and marks

We have some conventions (especially for naming) that are intended to be consistent
throughout this manual.

Manufacturer and product names are formatted in accordance with the standard rules of
English grammar, e.g. “Sansa playback is currently unsupported”. Manufacturer
and model names are proper nouns, and thus are written beginning with a capital
letter.

Links to the wiki are abbreviated by the name of the wiki page. Those names are still linked so
you can simply follow them like any other link in this manual. If you want to access a wiki
page manually go to http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/ and type the page name in the “Go” box
at the top of the page.